Bureau of Land Management's Land and Mineral Legacy Rehost System (LR2000) Mineral Use Cases for the Sagebrush Mineral Resource Assessment, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming

In 2015, approximately 10 million acres of Federal lands across six western states were proposed for withdrawal from mineral entry by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in order to conserve habitat critical for the greater sage-grouse. As a result, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) launched the Sagebrush Mineral Resource Assessment (SaMiRA) project in late-2015 to provide BLM with an assessment of the locatable minerals and an evaluation of the leaseable and saleable minerals within the proposed withdrawal areas. BLM provided Legacy Rehost 2000 System (LR2000) spatial data to the USGS on March 6, 2016 to help identify areas containing mineral leases and claims. The LR2000 system reports BLM land and mineral-use authorizations for oil, gas, and geothermal leasing, rights-of-ways, coal and other mineral development, land and mineral title, mining claims, withdrawals, classifications, and more on federal lands or on federal mineral estate.
The spatial data provided here generalize the detailed LR2000 information and related boundaries (for example, small mine claim boundaries) to a larger Public Land Survey System (PLSS) section boundary. The tabular data are summarized by PLSS section and by BLM serial numbers (cases). The GIS data consist of polygon vector files whose boundaries are either the PLSS square-mile sections or the PLSS sections grouped by serial number to potentially larger areas. The shapefiles present coal, geothermal energy, mineral materials, mining claims, non-energy solid minerals, oil and gas, and plans and notices information and can be used in a geographic information system (GIS) to show the general distribution and density of these BLM land authorizations. These datasets were used in the analysis of locatable, leasable, and salable minerals for the SaMiRA mineral resource assessment.